She was Blonde
by Janiqua
Summary: A look deep into the Doctor and Rose's legendary relationship after Martha Jones and Jack Harkness 'blog' in Utopia.


"**She was Blonde"**

_**A look deep into the Doctor and Rose's legendary relationship…**_

_**Author's Note: **__I can't say I own "Doctor Who." I don't even live in the UK. Oh well. This one's for Rose. I sympathize with Martha, but she and Jack really blew it at the start of "Utopia," so I'm just gonna rant for awhile. I've actually wanted to do this for a long time, but never knew how, so in a way I'm kind of glad Martha and Jack said what they did. It's a good opening. Anyway, you're gonna need to know your "Doctor Who" to really understand this. There's a lot written in here that I don't own and won't take credit for. That being said, feel free to leave a review! I hope you enjoy this one…_

**ooooooo**

"But the thing is, how come you left him behind, Doctor?" Martha asked with a barely detectable trace of accusation in her voice, hardly naïve but still hoping for some kind of reassurance that everything she'd just been told by Captain Jack Harkness had been maybe a misunderstanding. It was dark out and cold; perhaps not nearly as cold as it should have been, which was unsettling enough in itself, but the Doctor still would have rather liked some tea before jumping headfirst into this particular conversation.

"I was busy." Unfortunately, as far as evasive maneuvers went, he'd done better in the past. Martha wasn't buying it – not that she had any reason to. The Doctor had always known she'd ask him sooner or later about what he'd come to view as his own personal curse. The curse of the last living Time Lord. It was different with Jack. Maybe he _had_ abandoned the man, but that was a special case! People couldn't just contradict time itself on a regular basis, after all, and if something were to ever happen that made traveling with Martha intolerable, he'd at least have the common decency of seeing her safely home first. Of course, curt remarks like the one he'd just made never came out right and he could only imagine how that had sounded to the young medical student.

"Is that what happens, though? Seriously. You just get bored with us one day and disappear?" Sure enough, there was definitely indignation, bitterness, and even a hint of fear in her voice, which almost made him wince. Jack Harkness' untimely arrival had clearly been a slap in her face, just as much as Sarah-Jane Smith's had been in Rose's. He wouldn't be able to hold off the 'Talk' for very much longer. Apart from goodbyes, it was the hardest thing about traveling with companions… watching them grow in their realization that ultimately they couldn't be the center of his…

_"I don't age. I regenerate. But humans decay. You wither and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone who you…"_

_"What, Doctor?"_

_"You can spend the rest of your life with me. But I can't spend the rest of mine with you. I have to live on. Alone. That's the curse of the Time Lords."_

And they never understood. He always had to spell it out for them, every single time-

"Not if you're blonde!" Jack quite abruptly stated, before the Doctor could so much as think up an adequate way of explaining himself, to which Martha reacted like a stung cat.

"Oh, she was blonde! Oh, what a surprise!"

Now _that_ was uncalled for. "You two!" He spun around and glared at them both heatedly. How dare they? Not even Sarah-Jane had commented on Rose's hair color! "We're at the end of the universe!" He expected more from them. "Hmm!" Jack was over a hundred years old and he cared deeply about Rose. Martha was an extremely intelligent medical student who had recently undergone a horrific ordeal in 1913 involving considerable bigotry. Why did it feel like he was lecturing two unruly teenagers? "Right at the edge of knowledge itself, and you're busy _blogging_!" Forget conversations about curses and life spans; he was by far too frustrated for that right now. Marching past them, he muttered a quick "come on" before continuing with his explorations.

She was blonde. So what? He'd been blonde before! That had absolutely nothing to do with anything. Though, in all fairness, Jack wasn't too far off the mark. Rose had been… she had been different. He could never have grown bored with her and he certainly would never have disappeared on her.

_"I thought you and me were… but I obviously got it wrong. I've been to the year Five Billion, right, but this… now this is _really _seeing the future. You just leave us behind. Is that what you're going to do to me?"_

_"No. Not to you."_

It hadn't been a lie. Yes, he cared about Sarah-Jane, he cared about her deeply, but he had never been as close to her as he had been to Rose. The fact was more than one of his companions had actually chosen to leave themselves, for many different reasons. Romana. Tegan. Jo. The Doctor hadn't left them behind, they had left _him_ behind. But with Rose… he would have been happy growing old with her. He'd been an elderly man in past regenerations and knew he could be again if that meant spending a lifetime with Rose. She was different from all the others. So incredibly, amazingly different and he would never have abandoned her.

It wasn't that she was perfect or anything. Rose Tyler. Sometimes, she had really been an incredible nuisance.

_"Rose, if you've ever trusted me, then listen to me now. Stop looking at it! Your father's dead. He died when you were six months old. That is not your Pete. That is _a _Pete. For all we know, he's got his own Jackie – his own Rose. His own daughter who is someone else, but not _you._ You can't see him. Not ever."_

_I've gotta see him."_

_"You can't."_

_"I just wanna see him."_

_"I can't let you!"_

_"I've got the address and everything."_

_"Stay where you are, both of you! Rose, come back here! Mickey, come back here right now!"_

_"I just wanna _see _him!"_

Rose Tyler. When it came to her father, she always lacked a surprising amount of judgment.

_"When we met, I said 'travel with me in space.' You said 'no.' Then I said 'Time Machine.'"_

_"It wasn't some big plan. I just saw it happening and I thought… I can stop it."_

_"I did it again. I picked another _stupid_ ape…"_

_"But he's alive!"_

_"My entire planet died. My whole family. Do you think it never occurred to me to go back and save them? … Rose, there's a man alive in the world who wasn't alive before. An ordinary man, that's the most important thing in creation. The whole world's different because he's alive."_

_"What, would you rather him dead?"_

_"I'm not _saying _that-!"_

_"No, I get it! For once, _you're_ not the most important man in my life!"_

What a day that had been.

_"Now, Rose… You're not gonna bring about the end of the world, are you? Are you? … Jackie gave her to me to look after. How times change. … No. Don't touch the baby. You're both the same person and that's a paradox, and we don't want a paradox happening. Not with these things outside. Anything new – any disturbance in time makes them stronger. The paradox might let them in."_

_"Can't do anything right, can I?"_

_"Since you ask, no. So, Don't Touch The Baby."_

_"I'm Not Stupid."_

_"You could've fooled me."_

She hadn't deserved that. Rose had only meant well and he should have known to keep a sharper eye on her. Humans always wanted to save lives. Tegan had wanted to save Adric's life. What other purpose could a Time Machine have? Humans were like children. If they were going to travel with him, then they needed to be supervised. Rose hadn't made a mistake that day. She had merely followed her heart.

_"All right, I'm sorry. I wasn't really gonna leave you on your own."_

_"I know."_

_"But between you and me, I haven't got a plan. No idea. No way out."_

_"You'll think of something."_

_"The entire Earth's been sterilized. This, and other places like it, are all that's left of the human race. We might hold out for awhile, but nothing can stop those creatures. They'll get through in the end. The walls aren't that old. And there's nothing I can do to stop them. There used to be laws stopping this kind of thing from happening – my people would have stopped this. But they're all gone. And now I'm going the same way."_

_"If I'd realized…"_

_"Just… tell me you're sorry."_

_"I am. I'm _sorry_."_

How could he stay angry with her? The love she felt for her father… It was precisely why he loved humans so much. Anyone else might call it a weakness – and it had led them into considerable trouble on more than one occasion – but he knew how strong it made her. Not to mention how strong it made her father. It hadn't been the Doctor who saved the day that time, no, it had been Pete. An ordinary man. He found the courage to sacrifice himself to save so many lives, and that strength had come from Rose. Her greatest mistake had led to his greatest moment of nobility and that was what humans were all about. Heartbreaking as it was, it defined them. It made them better. One of the hardest lessons to learn in all the universe, but he had learned it and Rose had learned it and it was a good thing, too.

_"We are so very few. The last of our kind. We face extinction."_

_"Why? What happened?"_

_"Once we had a physical form, like you. But then the war came."_

_"War? What war?"_

_"The Time War. The whole universe convulsed. The Time War raged, invisible to smaller species, but devastating to higher forms. Our bodies wasted away. We're trapped in this gaseous state."_

_"So that's why you need the corpses."_

_"We want to stand tall. To feel the sunlight. To live again. We need a physical form and your dead are abandoned. They're going to waste. Give them to us!"_

_"But we can't!"_

Rose had argued from the start, much to his displeasure.

_"Why not?"_

_"It's not… I mean, it's not…"_

_"Not decent? Not polite? It could save their lives."_

Perhaps he'd felt guilty. Responsible. He was the one who had survived the Time War and so he felt he was the one who had to atone for the damage done to the Gelth. He hadn't even cared to listen to what Rose was trying to tell him. Tunnel vision. That's what he'd had and he wasn't proud of it.

_"They've been trying to get through from Brecon to Cardiff, but the road's blocked. Only a few can get through and then they're weak. They can only test drive the bodies for so long, then they have to revert to gas and hide in the pipes."_

_"Which is why they need the girl."_

_"They're not having her."_

Rose…

_"But she can help. Living on the rift, she's become part of it, she can open it up, make a bridge and let them through."_

_"You can't let them run around inside dead people!"_

_"Why not? It's like recycling."_

_"Seriously, though. You can't."_

_"Seriously, though. I can."_

_"It's just… wrong! Those bodies were living people! We should respect them, even in death!"_

_"Do you carry a donor card?"_

_"That's different, that's-!"_

_"It is different, yeah. It's a different morality. Get used to it or go home."_

It had never been easy, traveling with Rose Tyler. At least not in the beginning. They saw things differently. They saw the universe differently. There was so much she didn't understand, didn't care to understand, but at the same time, she understood so much more than even he did.

_"Get out of the way. Rose, get out of the way, now!"_

_"No! 'Cause I won't let you do this!"_

_"That thing killed hundreds of people!"_

_"It's not the one pointing the gun at me."_

_"I've got to do this. I've got to end it. The Daleks destroyed my home, my people. I've got _nothing_ left."_

_"Look at it."_

_"What's it doing?"_

_"It's the sunlight, that's all it wants!"_

_"But it can't…"_

_"It couldn't kill Van Statten, it couldn't kill me, it's changing. What about you, Doctor? What the hell are you changing into?"_

_"I couldn't… I wasn't… Oh, Rose. They're all dead."_

The Time War. It was always the Time War. With Rose, it had always been her father. With him, it had always been the Time War. So many mistakes had been made… but Rose was always there to correct him. He corrected her and she corrected him. They corrected each other even as they went through the most trying and difficult of times…

_"Why do we survive?"_

_"I don't know."_

_"I am the last of the Daleks."_

_"You're not even that. Rose did more than regenerate you. You absorbed her DNA. You're mutating."_

_"Into what?_

_"Something new. I'm sorry."_

Of course, Rose hadn't understood.

_"Isn't that better?"_

_"Not for a Dalek."_

He had pitied it.

_"I can feel so many ideas. So much darkness… Rose… give me orders. Order me to die."_

_"I can't do that."_

_"This is not life. This is sickness. I shall not be like you. Order my destruction. Obey! Obey! Obey!"_

_"Do it."_

_"Are you frightened, Rose Tyler?"_

_"Yeah."_

_"So am I. Exterminate."_

That's why she was so different. That's when he first realized it. He had always cared about his companions, he would die for them – he _had_ died for them. But more than anything else, he tried to teach them. Day after day, he guided them through time and space, teaching them about life, the universe, danger, injustice, and somewhere tea getting cold, but for once… he had been the child while Rose had been the one trying to teach him.

She made him want to be a better man. She made him want to improve himself. Instead of inspiring her, she inspired him and that made a world of difference.

_"Help her."_

Rose had spoken those two words when he took her far into the future, where they had encountered the very last 'human' in existence, Cassandra. After everything she had done, after every crime she had committed, Rose still asked him to help her. That kind of mercy, that kind of forgiveness… It was so rare.

_"Tommy, go after him."_

_"What for?"_

_"He's your dad."_

_"He's an idiot."_

_"Course he is. Like I said, he's your dad. But you're clever. Clever enough to save the world, so don't stop there. Go on!"_

And there was her wisdom. Eddie Connelly had not deserved pardon from his son, he had been a tyrannical father and a cruel husband who reigned over his family with an iron fist. But when his wife gained a backbone and threw him out of her house, Rose asked that Tommy give him a second chance. She was just like that. She was compassionate. Not to mention brave. Oh, yes, so very brave.

_"Suppose…"_

_"What?"_

_"Nothing."_

_"You said 'suppose.'"_

_"No, I was just thinking… I mean, obviously you _can't_, but… you've got a Time Machine. Why can't you just go back to last week and warn them?"_

_"Soon as the TARDIS lands in that second, I become part of events. Stuck in the timeline."_

_"Yeah, thought it'd be something like that…"_

_"There's another thing the TARDIS could do… It could take us away. We could leave. Let history take its course. We could go to Marbella in 1989."_

_"Yeah, but you'd never do that."_

_"No, but you could ask. Never even occurred to you, did it?"_

She had the heart of a lion. But she wasn't a lion, no. She was more of a wolf.

_"What've you done?"_

_"I looked into the TARDIS. And the TARDIS looked into me."_

_"You looked into the Time Vortex. Rose, no one's meant to see that!"_

_"This is the abomination!"_

_"Exterminate!"_

He could still hear the Dalek in his mind. He could still hear the Emperor. He could still see her… bathed in such brilliant golden light. He had wanted to save her. He had sent her home. He had lied to her, he had tricked her, to send her home, because it would have been impossible to convince her. Running away hadn't even occurred to her, so how could he convince her? He could still see her walking out of the TARDIS, glowing, radiating with power, and he could still hear the Daleks, with their abrasive, maddening, screaming voices, insulting her and threatening her. He could still see one of them firing at her and he still felt that terror as that bolt shot towards her, she was going to die, but then… she stopped it. She reversed it.

_"I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. I take the words, I scatter them in time and space, a message to lead myself here."_

_"Rose, you've got to stop this! You've to stop this _now_! You've got the entire vortex running through your head! You're gonna _burn_!"_

_"I want you safe."_

Those four words… She didn't understand the way it was supposed to work. He was the Doctor! He endangered his life to ensure his companions' safety, not the other way around! Rose got it backwards. She got everything backwards. _He_ was the protector! He was good at protecting, he was comfortable with it. _"I want you safe."_ When had he last heard such words? Had he ever? Yes, he had been told to take care, to be careful, not to go and get himself killed, but Rose… He hadn't had any control, he had been completely helpless, forced to watch as she stubbornly turned herself into his own personal guardian. He hadn't had a guardian since his childhood, really. Rose Tyler. She didn't just worry herself over him, she defended him. And that was a completely new experience he didn't know how to cope with.

_"I want you safe. My Doctor. Protected from the false God."_

_"You cannot hurt me! I am immortal!"_

_"You are tiny. I can see the whole of time and space – every single atom of your existence and I divide them. Everything must come to dust… all things. Everything dies. The Time War ends."_

She ended the Time War. He had lost everything in the Time War, but it had never truly ended. And though it didn't end that day, either, for they were not the last of the Daleks, at that moment… he had feared losing her as well. If he had lost her then… If she had died…

_"Rose, you've done it. Now stop. Just let go."_

_"How can I let go of this? I bring life…"_

She resurrected Jack. She made him immortal. Even then the Doctor had recognized the harm in that.

_"But this is wrong! You can't control life and death!"_

_"But I can. The sun and the moon. The day and night. But why do they hurt?"_

_"The power's gonna kill you and it's _my _fault!"_

She had been so powerful. The Doctor's guardian. She had taken it upon herself to reverse their roles and yet in the end she was still just a human girl who needed him. Despite all that power, she still needed to be saved. That was their relationship. She saved him. He saved her. He taught her. She taught him. Everything was mutual. It was in every sense of the word equal.

_"I can see everything. All that is… all that was… all that ever could be."_

Time Lord.

_"That's what I see! All the time! And doesn't it drive you mad?"_

_"My head…"_

_"Come here."_

_"It's killing me._

_"I think you need a Doctor."_

She had borne the weight of a Time Lord. A human had borne the weight of a Time Lord. It had only lasted for a heartbeat, but after having lost everything, everyone, Gallifrey, Romana, Susan, all of it, all of them, to the Daleks, that heartbeat had tasted like a mouthful of water in the middle of a scorching desert. The kiss they had shared… well, it certainly hadn't been a mere genetic transfer that meant nothing, that was for sure; it had meant everything! For the first time since the war, he wasn't just the lost, lonely Time Lord. For the first time, there was another. There was Rose. She had felt the madness. She had felt the pain. She had shared the burden. He owed her everything for that and he didn't even know how to begin repaying her.

_"And _you_, Rose Tyler, fat lot of good you were! You gave up on me – oh, that's rude. That's the sort of man I am now, am I? Rude. Rude and not ginger."_

Even after his regeneration, there had been times when she questioned him and times when he neglected her. When she met Sarah-Jane Smith. When he went after Madame de Pompadour. When she went after Pete Tyler. The road they took had not been an easy one. It never was.

_"It said 'Satan.'"_

_"Come on, Rose, keep it together."_

_"Is there no such thing? Doctor? Doctor, tell me there's no such thing!"_

They'd been to Hell and back. Literally.

_"If you are the Beast, then answer me this; which one? Hmm? Cause the universe has been busy since you've been gone. There's more religions than there are planets in the sky. The Archivits, Pordonity, Christianity, Pash-Pash, New Judaism, Sanclar, Church of the Tin Vagabond… which devil are you?"_

_"All of them."_

_"What, then you're the truth behind the myth?"_

_"This one knows me, as I know him. The killer of his own kind…"_

Now that had been hard enough to listen to, but what was spoken later… was devastating.

_"And the lost girl, so far away from home. The valiant child who will die in battle so very soon."_

_"Doctor, what does it mean?"_

_"Rose, don't listen."_

_"What does it mean?"_

_"You will die… I will live."_

The road had certainly not been an easy one! He wanted to protect her; he wanted to protect her so much.

_"So, that's the trap. Or the test, or the final judgment, I don't know. But if I kill you, I kill her… Except that implies – in this big grand scheme of Gods and Devils – that she's just a victim. But I've seen a lot of this universe. I've seen fake gods and bad gods and demigods and would-be gods; out of all that, out of that whole pantheon, if I believe in one thing, just one thing, I believe in _her_!"_

Rose Tyler. The Bad Wolf. The 'Blonde!' But he still believed in her. They were the stuff of legend, after all.

_"How long are you gonna stay with me?"_

_"Forever."_

Forever…

_"Doctor, they've got guns."_

_"And I haven't. Which makes me the better person, don't you think? They can shoot me dead, but the moral high ground is mine." _

They used to have so much fun together… But it couldn't last.

_"I'm supposed to go?"_

_"Yeah."_

_"To another world and then it gets sealed off?"_

_"Yeah."_

_"Forever. That's not gonna happen."_

It was the same old argument all over again.

_"Mum… I've had a life with you for nineteen years. But then I met the Doctor and… all the things I've seen him do for me, for you, for all of us, for the whole _stupid_ planet and every planet out there, he does it alone, mum. But not anymore. Cause now he's got me."_

Rose…

_"Once the breach collapses, that's it! You will never be able to see her again! Your own mother!"_

_"I made my choice a long time ago and I'm never gonna leave you. So what can I do to help?"_

She couldn't find her way back to him this time. Pete Tyler. He had finally managed to rip them apart completely. It was a good thing, though. Otherwise, she'd be trapped in the Void. Dead Space. The kind of Hell from which no one could escape, despite the notable absence of a certain Beast. Pete had saved her. Her father was always saving her when the Doctor couldn't. He knew he should be grateful… but sometimes he prayed that one day Rose would step out of the TARDIS as she had back on Satellite Five, glowing in golden light. He prayed that she would save him and that he would save her, because that's what they did. They saved each other.

_"There's a lot of things you need to get across this universe. Warp drive. Wormhole refractors. You know the thing you need most of all? You need a hand to hold."_

But she was gone now. Good old Pete with his good old human nobility saved her from the void while stealing her away into a parallel world. It wasn't fair, but then again, the Doctor wasn't an Isolus and he certainly wasn't a child, so he couldn't throw a 'temper tantrum,' as Rose had so aptly called it, just to get his own way. She was gone. She was gone, he was alone, and he'd grown to accept that. At least…

_"Oh, she was blonde! Oh, what a surprise!"_

He thought he had… The truth was he could barely even come to terms with the destruction of his own kind. How could he ever grow to truly accept the loss of someone that he…?

_"I'm burning up a sun just to say goodbye."_

He never got to tell her. But then…

_"If they get back in touch… if you talk to Rose… just tell her… tell her I… Oh, she knows."_

_"But I've seen a lot of this universe. I've seen fake gods and bad gods and demigods and would-be gods; out of all that, out of that whole pantheon, if I believe in one thing, just one thing, I believe in _her_!"_

_"I'm burning up a sun just to say goodbye."_

_"I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself."_

_"Where are we? Where did the gap come out?"_

_"This translates as Bad Wolf Bay."_

_"I take the words, I scatter them in time and space, a message to lead myself here."_

_"I love you."_

_"Quite right, too. And I suppose… if it's one last chance to say it… Rose Tyler…"_

She knew. She had to know. Because she wasn't just some 'blonde,' she was Rose Tyler. Her name was the name that kept him fighting. Martha knew it and so did Joan and so did Jack and so did hundreds of others throughout the universe. She was the stuff of legend. That's what she had become. A beautiful legend. And she would never be anything less.

**ooooooo**


End file.
